The hardware is clearly that of a "general purpose computer". The OS and software was/is limited in ways that make me think more of an appliance, though. A comp

The hardware is clearly that of a "general purpose computer". The OS and software was/is limited in ways that make me think more of an appliance, though. A complicated, customizable, but purposely limited appliance. I can write a Javascript program, stick it on a web server, and load it in the phone's browser. Why can't I edit it on the phone and just run the program from disk? If I wanted to do so, how would I write a program to let me? I think the core limitations for me are that I don't have direct access to the filesystem, I don't have access to the APIs required to program the device for things that I consider basic capabilities, and the vendor actively fights me being able to do those things. Any holes that they don't hit with OS and API limitations get caught during the app review when you're going to publish your code. Compare to a Chromebook: There's a Google-provided dev mode that lets me install an OS of my choice, and a chroot environment developed by a Google engineer that gives me access to an unrestricted OS running simultaneously on the machine. The command prompt's moot; one could theoretically write a GUI for anything and everything that it provides. The browser's "a valid virtual machine", but there are limitations of what I can do with JS, where I can host it to run the programs, and so on. My 1st gen iPod Touch was cool after I jailbroke it (kind of a wifi-enabled single-board computer). I used to run sshd and rtorrent, and had Perl and a C compiler on it. I do similar things on my Android device running its stock OS.